1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for recognizing speech and in particular to a method for recognizing speech using Eigenpronunciations.
2. Description of the Related Art
Methods and systems for recognizing speech of prior art severely suffer from the problem that the recognition rate generally strongly decreases in cases where speech in a target language to be recognized is uttered by a non-native speaker having a different source language as his mother or native tongue or language.
The reason for that is that conventional methods and systems for recognizing speech use pronunciations and pronunciation variants of native speakers of said target language, whereas the pronunciations of most people and in particular of non-native speakers often strongly deviate from the so-called canonical pronunciations of native speakers.
To manage the problem of decreasing recognition rates when recognizing speech in a given target language uttered by a non-native speaker it is common to enrich or enhance the dictionary or lexicon of the involved recognizer by adding non-native pronunciation variants or alternatives.
The commonly and conventionally involved different possible ways to obtain these alternatives or variants for non-native pronunciations are very difficult to perform and additionally they are very costly. Most conventional methods try to collect utterances in said target language which are uttered by non-native speakers who have said given source language as their mother or native tongue or language. Additionally, conventional methods try to cover all possible variants of pronunciations which are then included in the respective lexicon or dictionary. Therefore, the respective lexicon or dictionary contains manifolds of data which have to be evaluated during the process of recognition.